George Bernard Shaw quotes
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950): Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist. The library holds 170 quotes by George Bernard Shaw, drawn from Maxims for Revolutionists. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: humour, family, success, freedom, love, education
The best-known George Bernard Shaw quotes
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When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
In his efforts to escape from ugliness and unhappiness the rich man intensifies both. Every new yard of West End creates a new acre of East End.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is Purity.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience, and celibacy are the canonical vices.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Mutiny Acts are needed only by officers who command without authority. Divine right needs no whip.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Your word can never be as good as your bond, because your memory can never be as trustworthy as your honor.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
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Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The Master of Arts, by proving that no man has any natural rights, compels himself to take his own for granted.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Sentimentality is the error of supposing that quarter can be given or taken in moral conflicts.
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He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
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Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
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The right to live is abused whenever it is not constantly challenged.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant’s prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
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You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
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No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Do not give your children moral and religious instruction unless you are quite sure they will not take it too seriously. Better be the mother of Henri Quatre and Nell Gwynne than of Robespierre and Queen Mary Tudor.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
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Domestic servants, by making spoiled children of their masters, are forced to intimidate them in order to be able to live with them.
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The thieves had their revenge when Marx convicted the bourgeoisie of theft.
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The essential function of marriage is the continuance of the race, as stated in the Book of Common Prayer.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility.
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Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
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He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.
Maxims for Revolutionists -
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
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The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.
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Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.
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Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
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The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
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Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.
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Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
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The accidental function of marriage is the gratification of the amoristic sentiment of mankind.
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The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child’s character.
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In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.
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The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
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Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.
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If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
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Marriage is the only legal contract which abrogates as between the parties all the laws that safeguard the particular relation to which it refers.
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The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
Maxims for Revolutionists